Benjamin Thomas White,
The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of
Community in French Mandate Syria. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011. xiii + 239 pp.

James Reilly

This
book makes a general argument and it uses Mandate-era Syria as a case
study. The general argument is that the political concepts of
majorities and minorities make sense only in the context of the
modern state, especially the nation-state. Projecting these concepts
backward, as if there were coherent majorities and minorities prior
to the consolidation of modern (nation-) states, is anachronistic.
Until the emergence of modern nation-states, government power did not
claim to represent people or populations (invoking, instead,
variations on the concept of divine and/or aristocratic legitimacy).
But once claims to state legitimacy began to derive from (or to
depend on) concepts of popular sovereignty, differentiation of
cultural and communal groups into “majorities” and “minorities”
followed. These theoretical propositions were given specific form by
the ways in which modernizing elites inserted the state’s
bureaucratic and military authority into their subjects’ lives,
making new demands on people (now citizens) for whom “the state”
had previously been distant or intermittent, or both.

Readers
interested in Syria will recognize here the contours of an argument
that offers one entry point into a comparative study of the Ottoman,
Hapsburg, and Romanoff empires. Dynasties that previously had
anchored themselves ideologically on variations of divine and
aristocratic arguments sought now to retain their hold in the new
circumstances of the 19th
century. Thus they began to “nationalize” themselves through the
assertion of renovated and increasingly uniform bureaucratic and
military authority among their religiously and/or linguistically
diverse populations. Sultans, emperors and tsars made claims and
demanded loyalties that created or required new relationships between
rulers and ruled in an era of growing literacy, mass communication
and mass politics. The door was opened for communities that
previously had been religiously or linguistically distinct to define
and understand themselves as “minorities,” with a concomitant
implication that other groups constituted “majorities.” To the
extent that the “majority/minority” classification was written
into law or institutionalized, it became further reified. Political
entrepreneurs of various backgrounds used these categorizations to
make demands of the modern state, entrenching distinctions that in an
earlier period may not have been as watertight or impermeable as the
new dispensation (and as primordialist thinking) assumed.

Which
brings us to Mandate-era Syria. The bulk of Benjamin White’s book
is an explanation and analysis of how the concepts of “majority”
and “minority/minorities” entered French imperial and Syrian
national political discourse. Basing his work largely on French state
archives, the Syrian press, and scattered Syrian archival sources,
White argues that use of majority-minority vocabulary was largely
absent in the first decade of the French Mandate. While the French
had a communitarian understanding of Syrian society, this
understanding did not immediately lead to French authorities’ use
of the political concepts majority and minority. However, by the end
of the 1920s, French officials understood and portrayed Syria’s
Christian communities in this light, with the support of Syrian
Christian clerics who sought to wrest back representation of their
communities from laypeople who had emerged out of the millet system
during the Ottoman Tanzimat.

The
language of “minorities” became increasingly salient in the
1930s. Seeking a treaty relationship with France under the rubric of
“honorable cooperation,” the socially conservative National Bloc
took up the “minorities” discourse out of necessity, given the
post-World War I international environment where newly recognized or
aspiring nations (formed out of the wreckage of the Hapsburg and
Ottoman Empires) were obliged to acknowledge international safeguards
for groups designated as minorities. Who were minorities, and what
defined a “majority,” became part of the political tug-of-war in
Syria among and between French officials; political actors who sought
to speak for Syrian Arab nationalists; and political actors who
sought to achieve recognition of “their” communities as
minorities. White demonstrates that these arguments were not merely
(or even mainly) ideological or hypothetical, but they had concrete
implications for the locus and exercise of state authority, and even
for the final boundaries or borders of the Syrian state. He ably
looks at the dimensions of these debates, focusing on their
geographical implications in the Jazira, and on their legal
dimensions as demonstrated in the arguments over French
administrators’ stillborn effort to bring all religious communities
under civil authority (potentially at the expense of Sunni Muslim,
Christian and Jewish clerical authority).

At
the present time, when the language of majority-minority is very much
at the forefront of political discourse in and about Syria, and when
the future contours of the Syrian state are in flux, White’s study
helps readers to understand how “the politics of community”
developed in early 20th-century
Syria. The Emergence
of Minorities in the Middle East
is an antidote to interpretations of the Syrian present that depend
on an uncritically primordialist reading of the country’s past.

James
A. Reilly is a Professor of Modern Middle East History in the
Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University
of Toronto.